Perestroika

Perestroika, a Russian term meaning restructuring, was a set of political and economic reforms initiated in the Soviet Union during the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid to late 1980s. Built on the related policy of glasnost (openness), perestroika sought to revitalize a stagnating economy and to modernize the political system by changing how decisions were made and how much of the economy could be market-driven.

Economic reforms aimed to decentralize planning, promote greater factory autonomy, and introduce limited market mechanisms. The program allowed cooperative enterprises and private initiative in some sectors, encouraged foreign joint ventures, and pursued price reforms to reflect supply and demand rather than state quotas. The intention was to improve efficiency and innovation while keeping the state sector as the dominant economic actor.

Politically, perestroika went hand in hand with glasnost, encouraging greater political openness and a loosening of party controls. Reforms created new political bodies, such as the Congress of People's Deputies, and led to limited multi-candidate elections and constitutional changes in the late 1980s and 1990. While these measures aimed to democratize the system, they also exposed underlying national and ideological tensions within the Soviet Union.

The reforms contributed to a loosening of the centralized framework and a rise of nationalist movements, accelerating the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In the post-Soviet space, the legacy of perestroika is contested, credited by supporters with ending Soviet stagnation and enabling greater freedom, while critics point to economic hardship and the collapse of the political order.